From the personification of a “fated heroine” (300), to an unprovocative trophy wife, to the questioning of those two constructed narratives, as a reader, one trusts that by the end of the novel, the truest version of Mildred Bevel will rise.
As a reader, one is first introduced to Helen alias Mildred in the fictionalized account of the Bevels’ life. Bonds, the novel within a novel, has the mission to convey an appealing narrative for the masses, and at the time of its publication during the Great Depression, the societal consensus was to look for culprits in characters of great wealth, and what better symbol for wealth’s omnipotence than the Bevels. Therefore, to depict the wealthiest man as also the most out-of-touch, Vanner relied heavily on the distortion of Mildred into Helen in various aspects, but more specifically in her death. Instead of recounting her death as being the cause of cancer, he attributes her tragic demise to her insanity, where Vanner “broke her mind and her body simply because it made for a better story” (300), allowing the reader to cast blame towards Bevel’s arrogance and peculiarities, shaping him into the “villain” and Mildred into victim.
To debunk the version of his life as told by Vanner and construct a well-deemed legacy, Bevel decides to take a “shot” in storytelling. In his unfinished manuscript, Helen is distorted into Mrs. Bevel, a submissive, childlike, and predictable companion. The version, as told by Vanner, of someone with great intellect is reduced to a fragile muse with the “innocent yet profound wisdom of those who, like young children or the elderly, are close to the edges of existence” (157). The constant comparison to childlike characteristics and remarks that potentiate the secondary role of women, such as “saved me by making a home for me” (158), are Bevel’s attempts to shift and counterattack the focus given to Mildred in Vanner’s novel to him and his greatness.
The lack of trace of Mildred makes it hard for her to be appreciated for her truth, yet along comes Ida, Bevel’s ghost writer. Through her nonconformity and the slow unraveling of forgotten documents, she questioned Bevel and Vanner’s narratives. When inspecting her room, she recognized a “modern, austerely avant-garde atmosphere” (329), showing her independent boundary-breaking spirit. Ida realizes how Mildred’s genius was silenced through the manipulation of storytelling, which makes the discovery of her diary more satisfactory.
Alas comes Midred’s turn as storyteller and our turn as readers to “listen.” Unlike the other narrations, her’s is short and unthreaded, with the acknowledgment that “a bell in a bell jar won’t ring” (402), which is her way of saying that once in a coffin, there is no voice to produce. Yet, she took this realization to heart and exposed her feelings and truths within the days she had left, introducing the reader to the real Mildred, a bold, revolutionary, altruistic woman whose internal force was too much for the fragile-ego, power-thirsty men around her to accept.
You killed the title.
ReplyDeleteThe way you broke down each paragraph to discuss every section of the book was a clever way to transmit the story of Mildred the same way the reader was presented her. Additionally, the introduction to this post sits at the core of what this novel is about: Should the reader take a narrator’s word for truth? Within this post, you brought up one of my favorite lines from the novel found in Mildred’s portion, Futures, that being, “a bell in a bell jar won’t ring,” (402). I really enjoyed your literal interpretation that once Mildred has passed, and is placed beneath the earth, her voice will not be heard and thus she chooses to tell her truth in her diary. I had not considered this “bell jar” to be a final marking of time but rather a metaphor for the existence of most women from this period. My thoughts on it were that a bell jar creates an environment under a vacuum. Try as one might, no sound can be produced as there is nothing for sound waves to bounce off. This vacuum not only becomes the void Mildred enters when she passes but could be a metaphor of the environment most women lived in between the 1920s-30s. The same way Mildred’s narrative was left to be molded by men; women functioned to keep the home running in a docile manner. One can only last in a bell jar by holding their breath, but some (Ida perhaps) may find it hard to hold their breath and tongue at the same time.